A brief and so-called short feature presentation embedded at the beginning of the 1983 film The Meaning of Life takes corporate mobility to the absurd lengths only to be expected from the Monty Python gang.
An antiquated British insurance company building becomes a pirate ship, upping anchor from London to sail across the Atlantic. There its ‘sailors’ board business skyscrapers and do battle with American corporate giants, armed with cutlasses fashioned from ceiling fans.
This is a useful example of a company that is not an anchor company. It is capable of shifting its premises from one country and continent to another (whether it brings its archaic old building with it or not). Companies such as Montry Python’s Permanent Insurance Co. are sufficiently mobile to have the option moving to weather a financial storm such as a labour shortage or a housing shortage or both. They can simply change location to one more favourable for their particular brand of corporate swashbuckling.
Anchor companies are different. They are often both an important economic anchor of a particular community, as well as anchored to that community by investments in land and infrastructure. As a result, they are in a far less able to dodge a storm such as a growing affordable housing crisis.
If anchor company employees and other townspeople are finding it difficult or impossible to find affordable housing, what, if anything, could or should an anchor company do about a problem which traditionally has not been their problem, at least not directly? Is it incumbent upon employees and other citizens to solve their own housing problems? Or should anchor companies, confident in their importance to a community, simply wait for government to step in and fix the situation?
Fanny Mae1 and Urban Institute hosted a panel discussion recently to look at this anchor company problem. It seems that at least some of them are recognizing a responsibility to take actions to mitigate the local lack of affordable housing. What kinds of actions? Read more at HOUSINGWIRE: How Anchor Companies Are Tackling Affordable Housing Issues In Their Communities
Footnotes
- The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), aka Fannie Mae is a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), created in 1970.
